"Selections From the Writings of Kierkegaard" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kierkegaard Soren)

incidents; but his life of inward experiences is all the
richer╛witness the "literature within a literature" that came to be
within a few years and that gave to Danish letters a score of
immortal works.

Kierkegaard's physical heredity must be pronounced unfortunate.
Being the child of old parents╛his father was, fifty-seven, his
mother forty-five years. at his birth (May 5, 1813), he had a weak
physique and a feeble constitution. Still worse, he inherited from
his father a burden of melancholy which he took a sad pride in
masking under a show of sprightliness. His father, Michael
Pedersen Kierkegaard, had begun life as a poor cotter's boy in
West Jutland, where he was set to tend the sheep on the wild
moorlands. One day, we are told, oppressed by loneliness and cold,
he ascended a hill and in a passionate rage cursed God who had
given him this miserable existence╛the memory of which "sin
against the Holy Ghost" he was not able to shake off to the end of
his long life. When seventeen years old, the gifted lad was sent to
his uncle in Copenhagen, who was a well-to-do dealer in woolens
and groceries. Kierkegaard quickly established himself in the trade
and amassed a considerable fortune. This enabled him to withdraw
from active life when only forty, and to devote himself to
philosophic studies, the leisure for which life had till then denied
him. More especially he seems to have studied the works of the
rationalistic philosopher Wolff. After the early death of his first
wife who left him no issue, he married a former servant in his
household, also of Jutish stock, who bore him seven children. Of
these only two survived him, the oldest son╛later bishop╛Peder
Christian, and the youngest son, SФren Пbye.

Nowhere does Kierkegaard speak of his mother, a woman of
simple mind and cheerful disposition; but he speaks all the more
often of his father, for whom he ever expressed the greatest love
and admiration and who, no doubt, devoted himself largely to the
education of his sons, particularly to that of his latest born. Him he
was to mould in his own image. A pietistic, gloomy spirit of
religiosity pervaded the household in which the severe father was
undisputed master, and absolute obedience the watchword. Little
SФren, as he himself tells us, heard more of the Crucified and the
martyrs than of the Christ-child and good angels. Like John Stuart
Mill, whose early education bears a remarkable resemblance to
his, he "never had the joy to be a child." Although less
systematically held down to his studies, in which religion was the
be-all and end-all (instead of being banished, as was the case with
Mill), he was granted but a minimum of out-door play and
exercise. And, instead of strengthening the feeble body, his father
threw the whole weight of his melancholy on the boy.

Nor was his home training, formidably abstract, counterbalanced
by a normal, healthy school-life. Naturally introspective and shy,